Identitarianism

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Founders Would Abhor Trump’s Domestic Deployments: And the notion that courts can’t review his National Guard decisions is baseless. (Philip Allen Lacovara, Nov 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Founders would be appalled. They fought a revolution against a king who sent his troops against them to enforce his laws. That experience was fresh in their minds when they adopted a Constitution that says that Congress alone has the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

The president argues that it is appropriate for him to use the military “to execute the laws.” He also contends that the courts have no authority even to consider the legitimacy of his decision to summon National Guard troops and send them into American cities for what he deems law enforcement.

Neither position has constitutional support.

WHY ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY FAILURE WHEN I CAN BLAME A “THEM”?:

The New Medievals: The bones of our conspiracies haven’t changed, though their details are different. (Claire Lehmann, 10/27/25, The Dispatch))

We crave narratives that make the world legible, particularly in times of instability or flux. In psychological experiments conducted by Adam Galinsky and Jennifer Whitson in 2008, it was found that people who were made to feel powerless began to see patterns that were not there. Participants were asked to recall a moment in their lives when they felt powerless; afterward, they were shown random visual “static” images or sequences of stock data and asked to identify patterns. Those who had been primed to feel powerless were far more likely to report seeing shapes, trends, or connections that didn’t exist. “Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions,” the authors wrote. Another 2020 study found that a sense of a lack of agency also predicted belief in Jewish conspiracy.

The conspiracist’s worldview transforms chaos into drama and tragedy into design. It restores meaning to a confusing world by insisting that every disaster, every death, every downturn must have a reason.

NOT NAZIS!…JUST FOLLOWERS OF NAZISM…:

How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality (David French, Jan. 26, 2025, NY Times)

No one was more aware than the founders that the American experiment contradicts our base natures. A century before Schmitt was born, they understood that reality intimately.

Our government is constructed with the understanding that, as James Madison famously put it in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Constitution tries to ameliorate the will to power as best it can — as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” — but the founders also knew that even our elaborate system of checks and balances is insufficient. To make our system work, virtue is a necessity.

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” John Adams wrote in his 1798 Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Adams’s New England metaphor is perfect (his readers would absolutely know what a whale would do to a net): Pluralism requires both law and ethics to function, and without ethics the law will fail.

We forget how much the founders — for all their faults — were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center.

The book describes how the founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, listed temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.

You can immediately see the contrast with Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our foes. The virtues Franklin listed are not simply the way you love your own political tribe; they are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.

Demonstrate these virtues, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even when they lose a political battle. When your enemies show the same virtues, you can still enjoy a good life even when you lose. That’s the social compact of pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is ultimate defeat, and no victory is ultimate victory. And in all circumstances, your fundamental human rights must be preserved.

Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.

The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Building New Rafts: Trump’s Inheritance of the Legacy of the Left (Martin Jay, Salmagundi)

What, in addition to his seduction of a significant chunk of the working class, has Trump inherited from the playbook of the left in American political life? How has he and his right-wing populist movement refunctioned for their own purposes many of the traditional positions and attitudes that were once considered, grosso modo, “progressive?” What does this confusion of identities suggest for our conventional way of placing aggregated political formations along a linear spectrum? What does it portend for the future constellation of discrete positions that form, at least for a while, a shared platform or coherent ticket?

Painful as it is, we have to acknowledge the various ways in which the cards once dealt to a certain hand, and remained there for a long while, can later unexpectedly find their way into another. Let us begin with economic issues. At least ever since the Reagan administration, the bugaboo of the left has been neo-liberal globalization, which, broadly speaking, was accused of sacrificing domestic jobs in the pursuit of high corporate profits by investing abroad and profiting from cheap foreign labor. Neo-liberalism also meant fiscal austerity, the weakening of the welfare safety net, the undermining of unions, indiscriminate deregulation, the dissolution of barriers to free trade, and the marketization of as many social relations as possible. When the Democrats climbed, more or less, on board the neo-liberal express during the Clinton administration, it seemed as if both parties had placed their chips on a new international economic order run by plutocratic and technocratic elites beyond the control of democratic domestic politics. International organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund gained autonomy from national electorates.

For a long time, the left fulminated against the sins of neo-liberalism and the dangers of unaccountable globalization, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.3 From Reagan through the second Bush presidency, its cries of distress were met with scorn by staunchly conservative defenders of the sanctity of markets, smaller government, deregulation, balanced federal budgets and other neo-liberal shibboleths. During the past ten years, however, a curious erosion of the line between camps occurred. Signs were already there during the Brexit debate, when progressive voices urged the UK to leave the EU because, as an article in the leftist periodical Jacobin put it, “it provides an opportunity for a radical break with neo-liberalism.”4 Even after Brexit succeeded, Perry Anderson, UCLA historian and the esteemed editor of the New Left Review, continued his denunciation of the undemocratic nature of the European Union.5 Perhaps the most resonant symbolic expression of the converging of positions occurred when Steve Bannon unexpectedly reached out in 2017 to Robert Kuttner, the left-liberal editor of The American Prospect, to discuss their common hostility to China and talk strategy about promoting economic nationalism.

DEMAND MORE:

The Shutdown We Need: The fight should be for the Constitution (Robert Zubrin, Oct 10, 2025, The Cosmopolitan Globalist)

As a result of the election of Donald Trump, the rule of law has broken down in the United States. Thousands of convicted criminals who engaged in violence to support Trump’s efforts to prevent the certification of the 2020 election have been released. Those who prosecuted them have been fired and threatened with prosecution. Unidentified men, wearing masks and driving unmarked vehicles, are snatching immigrants—or alleged immigrants—off the streets and even from courts of law, then whisking them off without due process to hellhole prisons in foreign lands.

The FBI is raiding the homes of Trump’s critics, such as former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. In some cases, his critics have faced outright terror tactics: Last February, for example, the January 6 thugs whom Trump released from jail threatened to bomb a conference in Washington, DC, where Bolton was speaking.

In the past several months, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of two major television networks because their coverage was unfavorable to him. He has called for the White House to take over the Federal Reserve system. In direct violation of his oath of office, Trump refuses to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress, such as the TikTok ban.

Trump is undertaking further actions outside of his legal powers, including capriciously imposing or ending massive tariffs (a power assigned under the US Constitution to Congress), and deploying to unwilling states, putatively for law enforcement, the National Guard (usurping the power of state governments), and even US Army and Marine forces (outright illegal). […]

In short, since retaking office, Trump has mounted an all-out assault on Constitutional government, the rule of law, freedom of speech, free enterprise, free trade, American science, and the defense of the Free World. Compared to these issues, Obamacare is irrelevant. America was a free country before Obamacare, it was a free country after Obamacare, and it can remain free with or without Obamacare. It cannot remain free without its Constitution.

THE A-FRAME:

The populism horseshoe: A venerable political theory helps make sense of modern political attitudes (John Sides – October 8, 2025, Good Authority)

Why would we expect populist attitudes to be more prevalent at the ideological extremes? First, let’s define populism. Tamaki and Jung, building on other work, define it as “a thin-centered ideology that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups – ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ – and argues for politics to be an expression of the general will of the people.”

The ideological extremes are thus expected to be more populist because of certain cognitive tendencies. The far left and far right often share an “us vs. them” view of the world – even if they define “us” and “them” differently. Both groups also tend to oversimplify the world, and hold on to their simplified views with confidence. They are cognitively “rigid.” And they are particularly hostile toward those they view as opponents.

On top of that, the far left and far right are both “people-centered” in their way. They distrust authorities and “elites.” Thus, they valorize “ordinary people” as the only reliable and worthy decision-makers.

ESCAPING THE TRUE BELIEVERS:

How I Got Pulled into Charlie Kirk’s Movement—and Why I Left: Turning Point USA gave me purpose. But it took years to unlearn the politics I once accepted without question (Caroline Stout, Wendy Kaur, Oct. 1, 2025, The Walrus)

You were in high school when you joined Turning Point USA. What made you want to get involved?

I was involved with my local Republican Party. At this point, Charlie was going around fundraising. He held a kind of recruitment meeting for young people interested in politics in Houston. That was the first time I met him, when he made his pitch for Turning Point. His refrain was: “We only focus on limited government and fiscal responsibility. That’s it. We don’t focus on social issues, because that divides us.” That was really digestible for me at the time, because I really wasn’t sure where I stood on some social issues. And it’s easy to get behind fiscal responsibility and limited government. So it seemed pretty innocuous to me. […]

How much responsibility do you think Kirk bears for the climate of fear and outrage that has reshaped American politics?

When MAGA started to take over, Kirk really leaned into its rise. He was very ambitious, and so there was a major shift in his rhetoric during the first Trump administration. Early on, he even gave an interview emphasizing the importance of viewing policy through a secular lens. But in recent years, his message became much more aligned with Christian nationalism. That evolution tracks closely with the broader rise of Christian nationalism in politics and with MAGA. I wouldn’t place all the blame on him, but the embrace of nationalist and fascist rhetoric—anti-immigration, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism—is something for which he does bear responsibility.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A Reagan-Appointed Judge Just Wrote a Blistering Anti-Trump Decision (Noah Lanard, 9/30/25, MoJo)

Young, who is 85 years old and was appointed to the bench four decades ago, begins by quoting a postcard he received on June 19 that reads: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS …. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” Young replies in the ruling:

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case—

The judge goes on to write that the case he is deciding is “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.” He concludes that there was not an “ideological deportation policy” targeting pro-Palestine speech. Instead, there was something more sinister:

[T]he intent of the Secretaries was more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

By defending that policy, Young writes, the president has violated his “sacred oath” to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That Trump is “for all practical purposes, totally immune from any consequences for this conduct,” Young adds, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity decision, “does not relieve this Court of its duty to find the facts.”